The "Middle East and Terrorism" Blog was created in order to supply information about the implication of Arab countries and Iran in terrorism all over the world. Most of the articles in the blog are the result of objective scientific research or articles written by senior journalists.

From the Ethics of the Fathers: "He [Rabbi Tarfon] used to say, it is not incumbent upon you to complete the task, but you are not exempt from undertaking it."

Friday, January 6, 2017

Fostering vicious lies about a bastion of liberal democracy in a sea of tyranny and hate.

Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

Barack Obama’s abstention from a vicious, anti-Israel Security Council resolution is merely the latest attack in the West’s long, shameful war against Israel. That the historical birthplace of political freedom and human rights should make a pariah of its cultural offspring is an indelible stain on the honor of Europe and America.

That such irrational bigotry and moral idiocy should find a comfortable home in universities is even more reprehensible. Higher education is supposedly the protected space where critical thought, fidelity to truth, and humanistic principles are honored. But as Richard L. Cravatts meticulously details in his indispensable collection of essaysDispatches from the Campus War against Israel and Jews, universities and colleges today foster and promote the most vicious slanders and lies about a country that for nearly a century has had to continually fight for its existence, yet still has remained a bastion of liberal democracy and human rights in a region devoid of both.

Cravatts is the author of Genocidal Liberalism: The University’s Jihad against Israel and Jews, a recent president of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, and a board member of the AMCHA Initiative at the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under the Law. His new book catalogues in fine-grained detail how universities and scholars across the world have betrayed their professional integrity and moral decency by obsessively demonizing Israel. The intensity and irrationalism of this “deranged hatred of Israel,” as Cravatts writes, has made it “a covert, and surrogate, form of anti-Semitism itself,” one that reprises all the slanderous tropes of traditional Jew-hatred.

One technique of this cognitive bait-and-switch is an Orwellian degradation of language. Calling Israel a “colonial” or “imperialist” power bespeaks a willful ignorance of history. The use of question-begging epithets like “racist,” “genocide,” and “apartheid” is a way to camouflage bigotry and make Israel responsible for the aggression and terrorist attacks it has suffered for nearly a century. Even more despicable is the false analogy between Zionism and Nazism, the greatest killer of Jews in history. It takes a particularly brazen moral stupidity to equate the victims of genocide with their murderers.

Professional malfeasance likewise fosters the academic hatred of Israel. The popularity of the fraudulent literary critic Edward Said has corrupted not just Middle East Studies departments, but disciplines like English, history, and the social sciences. Add Muslim student groups sympathetic with jihadist organizations and their eliminationist goals; left-wing bitter-enders who see Israel as a neo-colonialist outpost of Western imperialism; and juvenile admirers of “revolutionary” violence and noble-savage multiculturalism, and the result is, as Cravatts writes, “the compromised purpose of higher education, where scholarship has been degraded by bias and extremism on the part of a left-wing professoriate with a clear political agenda that cites Israel as the new villain in a world yearning for social justice.”

Cravatts analyzes numerous instances of this reprehensible dynamic. In an article published by the esteemed medical journal Lancet, British doctors retooled the old medieval blood libel by accusing Israelis of wantonly and willfully targeting children and women in Gaza during operation Cast Lead, with no acknowledgment that Israelis were responding to a barrage of 10,000 rockets indiscriminately fired into their country. Similarly, the New Weapons Research Group fingered Israel for high concentrations of metals in the hair of Gazan children, and once again Lancet made Israel responsible for the “direct and indirect health effects of the Israeli occupation.” There is no similar concern for the traumatic consequences of Israeli children living under the constant threat of terrorist murder and rockets fired from Gaza and Lebanon. “By dressing up old hatred against Jews, combined with a hatred of Israel, and repackaging them as seemingly pure scholarship,” Cravatts writes, “Israel’s ideological foes have found an effective, but odious way” to blame Israel for the aggression against it.

Another example of academic anti-Semitism is the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, which is attempting to wage economic war on Israel as a way of weakening it and pressuring it to change its policies, if not outright destroying it. The movement is based on an egregious analogy between Israel and South Africa in the 1980s, when such international opprobrium and economic pressure were successful in ending apartheid. The BDS gang especially targets universities and their foundations in order to coerce them into divesting from the Israeli economy. Of course the analogy is blatantly false, as Cravatts notes: “That Israel’s society is multi-racial, ethnically diverse, and one in which Arabs, as twenty percent of the population, enjoy more civil and human rights” than in neighboring Arab countries is ignored. Buttressed by a false history accusing Israel of “occupation,” “genocide,” “land theft,” and “illegitimacy,” BDS attempts to combine the sins of colonialism and racism into one weapon for destroying Israel’s right to exist.

A constant theme in Cravatts’s grim catalogue is the egregious double standards used to judge Israel. The National Women’s Studies Association approves a boycott of Israel based on “the interconnectedness of systemic forms of oppression,” which leads to “sexual and gender-based violence” perpetrated by Israel against Palestinian Arab women. Ignored is the misogyny and sex-based discrimination encoded in the Koran, Hadith, and sharia law foundational to Islam. As Cravatts point out, the religiously inspired misogyny accounts for the high levels of violence against Arab women, and the internalization of the excuses for this violence by women who find it justified if, for example, they leave the house without their husband’s permission. Western “feminists” continually rail at such “false consciousness,” but when it comes to Palestinian Arab women, it “seem to have slipped off the moral radar screens of the NWSA.”

Or take the academic boycotts of Israeli scholars, who are banished from conferences and other scholarly gatherings because of their alleged complicity in “colonialist and racist policies,” as a Modern Languages Association member put it. Of course, scholars from tyrannical, misogynistic, anti-Semitic, and homophobic Arab states are still welcomed, their government’s depredations excused as the justified response to “colonialism” and “imperialism.” More despicable is the hypocrisy of American scholars whose universities reap billions in federal grants––famous Israel-hater Noam Chomsky’s MIT got nearly a billion dollars from the Defense Department in 2009 alone––yet are not similarly held accountable for what they think are their government’s evil foreign policies.

And let’s not forget the egregious double standard regarding free speech, which is not just a Constitutional right, but a corner-stone of academic freedom and its commitment to open critical discourse. Even as pro-Muslim and pro-Palestinian Arab student organizations openly and freely demonstrate and protest without hindrance from anyone, at the same time pro-Israel speakers “are shouted down, booed, jeered, and barraged with vitriol,” Cravatts writes. For example, in 2015 a lecture sponsored by the Minnesota Law School by Hebrew University professor Moshe Halbertal “was delayed for thirty minutes by the unruly heckling and chants of some 100 protestors” from anti-war and pro-Palestinian Arab groups. The same year, at the University of Texas, Dr. Gil-Li Vardi was disrupted by protestors who tried to prevent the event and continued to disrupt it. Cravatts documents numerous other examples of Israel-hating activists compromising academic freedom and free speech, all the while they are allowed to exercise their own right to peddle lies and hateful slanders of Israel

After reading Cravatts’s detailed exposure of the campus war against Israel and the Jews, one may wonder what can be done. One thing a president Trump and a Republican Congress can do is turn the progressives’ weapons against them. Campus political correctness of the sort that has fostered hatred of Israel and harassment of its supporters has been empowered and encouraged by the federal government’s ideological and overreaching interpretations of civil rights and sexual harassment law. A Trump Department of Education and civil rights division of the Department of Justice can warn universities and colleges that violations of Constitutional rights to free speech and due process, and tolerance of double standards in enforcing those rights, will be met with investigations and reductions of federal funding. Given that universities today receive billions of dollars in taxpayer funds––$76 billion in 2013–– most campuses will be highly motivated to start living up to the standards of reasoned discourse, balanced dialogue, and critical discussion that they tout in their recruitment brochures but serially ignore.

Until then, Congress can start by holding hearings on the illiberalism and corruption of American higher education––and by making sure they put Richard L. Cravatts high on the list of expert witnesses.

Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, a Research Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, and a Professor of Classics and Humanities at the California State University. He is the author of nine books and numerous essays on classical culture and its influence on Western Civilization. His most recent book, Democracy's Dangers and Discontents (Hoover Institution Press), is now available for purchase.Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/265327/campus-war-against-israel-and-jews-bruce-thornton Follow Middle East and Terrorism on TwitterCopyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

In a recent interview with the Fox Business Network, legal scholar Alan Dershowitz announced that because of U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison's past ties to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, he (Dershowitz) is prepared to “resign [his] membership to the Democratic Party after 50 years of being a loyal Democrat” if Ellison is named as the next DNC chairman.It's actually hard to figure out exactly what's got Mr. Dershowitz in such a snit. It's not as if Ellison represents some type of sudden, radical departure from what has become the mainstream Democratic position regarding race and religion. In fact, when it comes to racialism and anti-Semitism, Ellison is a mere piker compared to Barack Obama, for whom Dershowitz voted twice. That would be the same Barack Obama who spent 20 years worshiping in the church of a racist Jew-hater named Jeremiah Wright; the same Barack Obama whose longtime close friend and mentor, Professor Rashid Khalidi, was a devoted ally of the late Jew-killer extraordinaire, Yasser Arafat; the same Barack Obama whose policies toward Israel were described by a Likud Party chairman as “catastrophic”; the same Barack Obama who, according to Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren, has plunged “Israel’s ties with the United States” into “a crisis of historic proportions”; and the same Barack Obama who, in an act of historic treachery just a few days ago, permitted the passage of a U.N. Security Council resolution demanding an end to Israeli settlement-building in the West Bank.By any metric one chooses, Keith Ellison's resumé makes him an absolutely perfect choice to continue this proud Democratic tradition of endlessly stoking the fires of racial and religious antagonism.While attending law school in 1989-90, for instance, Ellison, who had converted to Islam in 1982, wrote several student-newspaper columns where he: (a) stated that the U.S. Constitution is “the best evidence of a white racist conspiracy to subjugate other peoples”; (b) advocated slavery reparations as well as the creation of a geographically self-contained “homeland” for black people in the Southeastern United States; (c) praised the Jew-hating Nation Of Islam (NOI) organization for “all of its laudable work”; and (d) defended the incendiary NOI spokesman Khalid Abdul Muhammad—a black supremacist who once praised a black gunman for killing six white commuters (and wounding fourteen others) in a racially motivated atrocity aboard a New York City train—as a hero who possessed the courage to “just kill every goddamn cracker that he saw.”In February 1990, Ellison participated in sponsoring Kwame Ture (a.k.a. Stokely Carmichael) to speak at his law school on the topic of Zionism's ties to “imperialism” and “white supremacy.” The speech was replete with anti-Jewish slander—hardly a surprise, given that Ture, who in the '60s had called for “killing the honkies,” was now in the habit of proclaiming that “the only good Zionist is a dead Zionist.”Ellison supported, and was affiliated with, the Nation of Islam and Louis Farrakhan for at least a decade, from the late 1980s through the late '90s. Notwithstanding Farrakhan's long, well-documented history of venom-laced denunciations of “white devils” and Jewish “bloodsuckers,” Ellison described him as “a role model for black youth” who was “not an anti-Semite”; as “a sincere, tireless, and uncompromising advocate of the black community and other oppressed people around the world”; and as “a central voice for our [black people's] collective aspirations.”When Farrakhan supporter Joanne Jackson—the then-executive director of the Minneapolis Initiative Against Racism—asserted in 1997 that “Jews are among the most racist white people I know,” Ellison declared that he and his NOI comrades “stand by the truth contained in [Jackson's] remarks.”In February 2000 Ellison gave a speech at a fundraising event sponsored by the Minnesota chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, on whose steering committee he previously had served. Also in attendance was the former Weather Underground terrorist Bernardine Dohrn, a longtime Obama friend and political ally who had once devoted her life to the goal of fomenting violent revolution across the United States. Incidentally, that 2000 fundraiser was held on behalf of onetime Symbionese Liberation Army terrorist Kathleen Soliah, after her apprehension for the attempted murder of some Los Angeles police officers. Ellison called for Soliah's release, and also spokefavorably of such high-profile killers and leftist icons as Mumia Abu Jamal, Assata Shakur, and Geronimo Pratt.But alas, America would still have to wait another six-plus years before Ellison would finally grace the U.S. Congress with his presence. Following his electoral triumph in 2006, Ellison's victory party featured a number of his supporters shouting “Allahu Akbar!”—the traditional battle cry of Islamic jihadists.Between 2006 and 2016, Ellison spoke at a minimum of twelve fundraising events sponsored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an organization whose co-founders had close ties to the Islamic Association for Palestine, which functioned as a public-relations and recruitment arm for Hamas—the infamous horde of missile-launchers and suicide bombers committed to the mass murder of Jews. At one of those dozen CAIR fundraisers, Ellison urged his listeners to support Sami al-Arian, the former University of South Florida professor who already had confessed to aiding and abetting the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which, like Hamas. has always had a fondness for the smell of dead Jews.Ellison has also spoken at numerous conventions held by organizations like the Islamic Society of North America, the Muslim American Society, and the Islamic Circle of North America, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, and the the North American Imams Federation—all of which are closely affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood, you may recall, advocates the use of violent jihad for the creation of a worldwide Islamic caliphate ruled by strict Sharia Law, and is the parent organization of both Hamas and Al-Qaeda.But apart from that, the Brotherhood is quite moderate.In 2007 Ellison denounced what he called the baseless “persecution” of several officials of the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) who were being tried on charges that they had funneled millions of dollars to Hamas. The trial ended with a hung jury on most counts, but the following year the HLF defendants were retried and convicted on all charges.In a July 2007 speech, Congressman Ellison likened the Bush Administration's military response to the 9/11 attacks, to the manner in which the Nazis had exploited the 1933 burning of the Reichstag in Berlin: “It’s almost like the Reichstag fire, kind of reminds me of that. After the Reichstag was burned, they blamed the Communists for it, and it put the leader [Hitler] of that country in a position where he could basically have authority to do whatever he wanted.”During “Operation Cast Lead” (OCL)—a December 2008/January 2009 military operation in which Israel sought to quell the aggression of Hamas and other terrorists in Gaza—Ellison made it quite clear that his hatred for America was equaled by his contempt for Israeli Jews. Stating that he was “torn” on the issue, he refused to support a nonbinding House resolution “recognizing Israel's right to defend itself against attacks from Gaza” and “reaffirming the United States' strong support for Israel.” In September 2009, Ellison called for an end to all U.S. aid to Israel.In 2009 as well, Ellison met with Mohammed al-Hanooti—a leading U.S.-based fundraiser for Hamas—at a campaign event for Virginia House of Delegates candidate Esam Omeish, who had previously exhorted Palestinians to follow “the jihad way” in their struggle against Israel.While Ellison is fond of pro-jihadists like al-Hanooti, he's not too keen on Muslims who seek to persuade other members of their faith to reject jihad and Islamic supremacism. In the fall of 2009, for instance, Ellison disparaged Zuhdi Jasser, a Muslim activist who has consistently warned about the threat that political Islam poses to the West, as an Islamic “Uncle Tom.”During his 2010 congressional re-election bid, Ellison accepted campaign contributions from such notables as Jamal Barzinji and Hisham Al-Tali—both of whom had previously served as vice presidents of the Saudi-dominated, pro-jihad International Institute of Islamic Thought, and both of whom had been identified by the FBI as U.S. leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood.In September 2012 Ellison condemned a portion of the Republican Party Platform which stated that “there must be no use of foreign law by U.S. courts in interpreting our Constitution and laws.” Characterizing this as a manifestation of anti-Sharia intolerance, the congressman said: “It's an expression of bigotry.… They're demonstrating hatred toward Muslims.… [T]hey're the party that is basically a bigoted party and they have now officially declared themselves against a whole segment of the American population ...”During Operation Protective Edge—a 2014 Israeli military incursion that was launched in response to a dramatic escalation in rocket fire against Israel by Hamas-affiliated terrorists in Gaza—Ellison penned a Washington Postop-ed arguing that any ceasefire should be predicated on Israel ending its blockade of Gaza. Curiously, he made no mention of the fact that the blockade, which explicitly permitted the import of humanitarian supplies and other basic necessities, had been implemented out of necessity in 2007, due to Hamas's relentless importation and deployment of deadly weaponry from its allies abroad.Also in 2014, Ellison was one of only eight Members of Congress to vote against a House Resolution to increase the amount of U.S. financial aid that was earmarked to help Israel maintain and develop its Iron Dome missile-defense system—a system that had successfully intercepted 735 Hamas rockets aimed at Israeli population centers during Operation Protective Edge.To be fair, we should note that Ellison is no less concerned about Israel's national security than he is about America's. Indeed, when President Obama announced in September 2015 that he planned to admit 10,000 Syrian refugees to the U.S. during the ensuing year, Ellison said: “Ten thousand is not enough. Aren’t we the people who say, ‘give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses’? We must do more for families who are not safe in their own homeland.” He said this in spite of the fact that the Islamic State's bloodthirsty savages had openly vowed to secrete their own terrorist operatives into the refugee masses, as well as the fact that high-ranking government officials like FBI Director James Comey, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, CIA Director John Brennan, and FBI Deputy Assistant Director Michael Steinbach had all said that it would be impossible to reliably screen out terrorists posing as refugees.In 2015 as well, Ellison voiced his unequivocal support for the passage of the Iran Nuclear Deal, which allowed the Islamist regime in Tehran to enrich uranium, build advanced centrifuges, purchase ballistic missiles, fund terrorism, and have a near-zero breakout time to a nuclear bomb approximately a decade down the road. “This deal is a triumph of diplomacy over war and proves negotiation is an excellent method of peacemaking,” said Ellison.Last year, Bernie Sanders used his influence to secure, for Ellison, a major role in formulating the Democratic Party’s platform for the presidential election campaign. As terrorism expert Steven Emerson reports: “Ellison and other delegates supporting Sanders wanted the Democratic Party platform to delete a description of Jerusalem as Israel's 'undivided capital' and wanted to gut language opposing the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement targeting the Jewish state.”At the Democratic National Convention last July, Ellison was a featured speaker in a session held by the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation—part of an alliance of anti-Israel organizations that promote the Boycott, Divestment, & Sanctions (BDS) campaign. Ellison himself supports BDS, a Hamas-inspired initiative that aims to use various forms of public protest, economic pressure, and court rulings to advance the Hamas agenda of permanently destroying Israel as a Jewish nation-state.But lest you think that Ellison's only qualifications for the post of DNC chairman are his Jew-hatred, his admiration for Islamist radicals, and his utter contempt for his own country, don't neglect to credit him also for the high regard in which he held the late totalitarian dictator and mass murderer Fidel Castro. After Castro died this past November, Ellison sang his praises as a “revolutionary leader” who had nobly “confronted a system of government that excluded everybody except the military and the money-rich”; who had “[stood] up for peace and freedom in Africa”; who had “[taken] on the South Africa apartheid military forces and defeated them”; who had “deployed doctors anywhere … people were sick”; and who had “made medical education very available [and] made medicine available.”So, here's to Keith Ellison—in hopes that he will get the DNC chairmanship that a man of his caliber so richly deserves.

John PerazzoSource: http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/265360/man-who-most-deserves-be-dnc-chairman-john-perazzo Follow Middle East and Terrorism on TwitterCopyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

It looks like charity, but goes straight to Islamic State.

What the head of the Charity Commission in the UK, William Shawcross, said to the Sunday Telegraph,
was merciless but historic . Humanitarian NGOs have become the Trojan
horse of Islamic extremism. Charities are used for terrorist purposes.

There
are many ways in which Islamic terrorism is self-financing and lives
through the suicidal generosity of the European taxpayer. One is known
as the welfare state. The terrorists who struck Paris and Brussels used
the generous British welfare to fund Jihad.

But there is another, more sinister supply route and it is that of NGOs, non-governmental organizations.

In
Britain, NGOs are a majestic apparatus: a fifth of humanitarian aid
every year allocated by Downing Street goes into the pockets of
charities. A huge amount of money goes to Jihad and Islamism. The
British Commission, for example, prevented the flow of money that two
NGOs, the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust and Anita Roddick Foundation,
had allocated to Islamist associations. In particular, the NGO Cage
with its Jihadist sympathies is handsomely supported by foundations such
as the Joseph Rowntree Trust, the Quaker fund created by the chocolate
magnate.

There is the case of Aid Convoy, a British NGO
accused of channeling money to the fighters of the Islamic State, in
particular through the sweets prepared for Syrian children. The charity
had come under investigation in December 2012, when the Kent police
seized more than 40,000 pounds on one of its members in Dover leaving
for Syria.

The NGO Global-Fatiha should have
brought support and aid to Syrian refugees fleeing the war, but in truth
rerouted the funds to buy weapons for the Islamic State. The Charity
Commission in the UK also said that “aid convoys” to Syria are often
exploited by jihadists. The suicide bomber Abdul Waheed Majeed reached
Syria via a “convoy” organized by a British NGO, Children in Deen.

The
same British aid worker, Alan Henning, killed by Jihadi John in the
wilderness of Raqqa, was taken to Syria with a convoy of humanitarian
aid. A trap. The HSBC bank has severed links with one of the largest
British NGOs, Islamic Relief, over alleged fears of funding Jihadist
terror. The Islamic Relief receives millions of pounds from the UK
Department for Development. Earlier, the Israeli government had banned
the Islamic Relief from Judea and Samaria in 2014 for links with the
terror organization Hamas.

Another English NGO, the Society
for the Unwell and Needy, has links with a Pakistani Islamist movement.
British politicians are often involved. One is Diane Abbott, Labour’s
shadow minister, who received a donation from another NGO under
investigation for ties to terror, the Muslim Charities Forum.

Humanitarianism
has definitively crossed the red line separating the defense of human
rights and the care for the victims of war from thjose in collusion with
those responsible, often, for the same bloodbaths.

Giulio Meotti an Italian journalist with Il Foglio, writes a twice-weekly column for Arutz Sheva. He is the author of the book "A New Shoah", that researched the personal stories of Israel's terror victims, published by Encounter and of "J'Accuse: the Vatican Against Israel" published by Mantua Books.. His writing has appeared in publications, such as the Wall Street Journal, Frontpage and Commentary. Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/20008 Follow Middle East and Terrorism on TwitterCopyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

The Left can’t stop hating and killing Jews.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.Democrats have come down with a wicked virus. Somewhere along the way they caught Nazi fever.

It’s not the Nazi fever of the fevered headlines in which Trump is the new Fuhrer and Republicans are the new Third Reich.The truth is that there’s only one major political party in this country that supports the murder of Jews.

The Democrats demand the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Jerusalem. They fund the mass murder of Jews by nuclear fire, rocket, bullet, bomb and bloody knife. And they collaborate and defend that terror.President Clinton was the first to openly fund Islamic terrorists killing Jews. Men, women and children across Israel were shot and blown up by terrorists funded by his administration. And when terror victims sought justice, instead of protecting them from Iran, he protected Iran’s dirty money from them.And he was not the last.Secretary of State John Kerry and National Security Adviser Susan Rice collaborated with the leaders of a terrorist organization, with American and Israeli blood on its hands, on a UN attack on Israel that demands that Jews be banned from moving into neighborhoods and areas claimed by Islamic terrorists.A leaked transcript showed Kerry conspiring with Saeb Erekat, who has praised the mass murderers of Jews and spewed anti-Semitism. Erekat is called a “negotiator”, a strange term considering that the PLO and its various front groups, including the Palestinian Authority, refuse to negotiate with Israel.Erekat has made his position on the Jewish State quite clear. “We cannot accept the Jewish state – Israel as a Jewish state – not today, not tomorrow and not in a hundred years.”Instead of reproving Erekat, Susan Rice warned him about Trump. Rice, like the rest of Obama’s team, was not only closer to the terrorists than to Israel, but was closer to the terrorists than to Trump.Obama praised PLO boss Abbas despite the terrorist leader’s own admission, “There is no difference between our policies and those of Hamas.” The terror organization headed by Obama’s pal had honored a monster who butchered a 13-year-old Jewish girl in her own bedroom as a “martyr”.The White House backed the Muslim Brotherhood whose “spiritual” witch doctor had praised Hitler and expressed a wish that Muslims would be able to finish the Holocaust.Sheikh Rashid Ghannouchi, another beneficiary of Obama's Jihadist Spring, endorsed genocide. "There are no civilians in Israel. The population—males, females and children... can be killed.”When this monster, who had called for the extermination of the Jews, visited the United States, he was honored at a dinner whose speakers included Obama’s Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State.

If the left really wants to find Hitler and Nazism, it ought to look in the mirror. The Democrats have become a political movement that aids and celebrates the mass murderers of Jews.And they keep playing the victim.Imitating the tactics of the Muslim terrorists that Israel was at war with, Obama would pick a fight with one of the world’s smallest countries and then pretend that it had assaulted him for no reason at all.

Israel was always snubbing, insulting and humiliating him by doing such outrageous things as living in houses, addressing Congress or complaining about the aid he was providing to Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Now he leaves office, and just like Jimmy Carter, he is still whining about the Jews.When the Dems backed Obama, they pulled an “Ellison”. They took a bigot with an ugly background and made him king. Some wanted to believe that his views were more moderate than associates like Jeremiah Wright (“Them Jews ain’t going to let him talk to me") and Ali Abuminah (“Making Yom Kippur a UN holiday to honor the genocidal ‘state’ of Israel would be sure way to increase global anti-Jewish sentiment.”) Others knew exactly what they were getting with Barack Hussein Obama.Now Obama has taken off his mask. You can see Jeremiah Wright and Ali Abuminah leering through.

Any genuinely pro-Israel supporters must admit the truth. Those who refuse aren’t in denial anymore. They are playing the same game of feigned moderation that Obama was all along.Obama’s unmasking also tears off the Dem disguise.Democrats wanted to have their cake and eat it too. They wanted to be able to pretend that they were pro-Israel and hit up Jewish donors for cash while advocating policies that were killing Jews. They wanted to send billions of dollars to terrorists in the West Bank and Iran to kill Jews before stopping by AIPAC to deliver meaningless speeches about how much Israel means to them.And those Jews who put the values of the left ahead of Jewish values wanted to pretend that there was no contradiction. Now that Great Big Lie is coming apart. And Obama’s war on Israel helped kill it.Obama’s attack and the rise of Keith Ellison mark the end of all illusions about Israel. The booing of Jerusalem, the Democrat boycott of Netanyahu’s speech and the Iran nuke sellout were all signposts on the road. This is the end of the road. The lame jackass has drifted all the way to the left side.And the left had been in the business of oppressing and killing Jews for a long time. As the Democrats moved to the left, they also went into the business of financing the murder of Jews.President Clinton was the first to openly fund Islamic terrorists killing Jews. Obama took that money and doubled, tripled and quadrupled it. That terror funding has been justified by the pursuit of a phantom “two-state solution” and “nuclear deal” that were nothing more than Islamic terrorist plots to destroy Israel.

But as the Democrats have become the radical left, they are abandoning the pretense that they kill Jews because they like them and that they fund Islamic terror only to help Israel.They are becoming an anti-Israel party in name as well as in fact.In the warm spring of his final year, President George W. Bush arrived in Israel. In a marked contrast with his successor who refused to speak in Israel’s parliament in Jerusalem, he addressed the Knesset."Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals," President Bush told the audience, which included veterans of the fight against Islamic terror.To thunderous applause, he denounced the "false comfort of appeasement".“America stands with you in breaking up terrorist networks and denying the extremists sanctuary. And America stands with you in firmly opposing Iran's nuclear weapons ambitions,” he declared."Some people suggest that if the United States would just break ties with Israel, all our problems in the Middle East would go away. This is a tired argument that buys into the propaganda of our enemies, and America rejects it utterly.”America may reject it. But the Democrats do not.After Kerry’s attack, Trump tweeted, “Stay strong Israel, January 20th is fast approaching!” The period between January 20, 2009 and January 20, 2017 marked a dark time in American and Israeli history.

The darkness is lifting. It’s morning in America. It’s morning in Jerusalem.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/265353/how-democrats-became-anti-israel-party-daniel-greenfield Follow Middle East and Terrorism on TwitterCopyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

The European publics might get fed up with the distraction
tactics of talking about garments and instead seek answers to the
challenge we now face, as well as retribution at the polls for the
politicians who brought us here.

In the wake of the attack in
Nice, there should have been a fulsome public discussion over what if
anything can be done to ensure that people who have been in France for
many years -- in some cases their entire lives -- are not indoctrinated
to hate the country so much that they drive a truck through a crowded
sea-front on Bastille Day.

Or there could have been a wide public debate over whether, with
so many radicalised Muslims already in France, it was a wise or foolish
idea to continue to import large numbers of Muslims into this already
simmering situation.

Merkel seems to hope that with this raising of a burka ban the
German public will forgive or forget the fact that here is a political
leader so devoid of foresight that she unilaterally chose to allow an
extra 1-2% of the population to be added to her country in a single
year, mainly Muslim, mainly male and mainly young.

The burka and burkini, like the headscarf, are only issues
because millions of people have been allowed, unchecked, into Europe for
years. The garment is merely the simplest issue at which to take aim.
Far harder are the issues of immigration and integration. It is possible
that Europe's politicians cannot answer these questions, because any
and all answers would point the finger at their own failings.

2016 was a fine year for Islamist terrorism and an even finer year
for Western political distraction. While Islamic terrorists repeatedly
succeeded in carrying out mass-casualty terrorist attacks, as well as a
constant run of smaller-scale strikes, the political leadership of the
free world continued to try to divert their public.

The most striking example of the year came in the summer with the
French debate over whether or not to ban the "burkini" from the beaches
of France. The row erupted in the days after another 86 people were
murdered in a jihadist terrorist assault -- this time in Nice, France.
With no one sure how to prevent access to vehicles or any idea how many
French Muslims might want to follow suit, the French media and
authorities chose to debate an item of beachwear. The carefully staged
decision by an Australian Muslim woman to have herself filmed while
wearing a burkini on a French beach ignited the row, which was eagerly
seized upon by politicians.

At the local and national level, the decision to discuss the burkini
allowed all the larger political issues behind Europe's growing security
problem to be ignored. In the wake of Nice, there should have been a
fulsome public discussion over what if anything can be done to ensure
that people who have been in France for many years -- in some cases
their entire lives -- are not indoctrinated to hate the country so much
that they drive a truck through a crowded sea-front on Bastille Day. Or
there could have been a wide public debate over whether, with so many
radicalised Muslims already in France, it was a wise or foolish idea to
continue to import large numbers of Muslims into this already simmering
situation.

As it was, neither of these debates did occur, and no meaningful
political action was taken. Instead, the issue of the burkini sucked all
the oxygen out of the debate, leaving no room to discuss anything more
serious or longer term than beachwear.

In
the wake of the July 14 attack in Nice, France, in which 86 people were
murdered, there should have been a fulsome public discussion over what
if anything can be done to ensure that people who have been in France
for many years -- in some cases their entire lives -- are not
indoctrinated to hate the country so much that they drive a truck
through a crowded sea-front on Bastille Day. (Image source: France24
video screenshot)

Across the continent in 2016, it appeared that other politicians
realised the enormous advantage of such distraction debates. For
instance, in the Netherlands in November, the country's MPs voted for a
ban on wearing a burka in public places. Prime Minister Mark Rutte
apparently found this an enormously convenient debate. Not only did it
temporarily reduce some of the pressure that his government is feeling
at the rise of Geert Wilders's Freedom Party to the top of opinion
polls, but it also distracted attention from the years of mass
immigration and lax integration demands which have been a hallmark of
the Dutch experience.

After importing hundreds of thousands of people whose beliefs the
Dutch authorities rarely bothered to question, the public would be
satisfied -- the Rutte government hoped -- if only the small number of
Dutch Muslim women who wear the burka were prevented from doing so. The
Netherlands will have to see whether its implementation of such a law
works any better than it does in neighbouring France, where "white
knights" routinely show up to pay the fines of women fined for violating
the burka ban there.

The Rutte government was not the only one to adopt this cynical
strategy. Its most cynical deployment of all came in December, with the
announcement by the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, that she would ban the burka in Germany.

As with the Dutch government, Merkel clearly hoped that in throwing
this tidbit to the German public she might head off the threat that the
Alternative for Germany party (AfD), among others, now poses to her
party in this year's election. But the move also raises the question of
just how stupid does Angela Merkel believe the German people to be? It
would seem that Merkel hopes that with this burka ban the German public
will forgive or forget that here is a political leader so devoid of
foresight that she unilaterally chose to allow an extra 1-2% of the
population to be added to her country in a single year, mainly Muslim,
mainly male and mainly young.

This is a Chancellor who, even having previously admitted that
Germany's multicultural model had "failed," revved immigration up to
unprecedented and unsustainable levels. Now, like her counterparts
across the continent, she must hope that the German public are satisfied
by this burka morsel and that, as a result, they will return Merkel and
her party to power so that they can repeat whichever of their mistakes
they choose in the years ahead.

It is possible, of course, that the European publics are wiser than
their leaders and that they will see through these cynical and
distracting tactics. There are extremely good reasons to ban any garment
which covers a person's face and allows them to wander as an anonymous
stranger in our societies. There are some -- though fewer -- reasons to
ban wearing a burkini on a beach. Certainly the governments of France,
the Netherlands and Germany are within their rights to instigate and
enforce any and all such bans. Such moves, however, are but the smallest
register imaginable of a problem that seems far beyond this generation
of politicians.

The burka and burkini, like the headscarf, are only issues because
millions of people have been allowed, unchecked, into Europe for years.
The garment is merely the simplest issue at which to take aim. Far
harder are the issues of immigration and integration. It is possible
that Europe's politicians cannot answer these questions because any and
all answers would point the finger at their own failings. Or it is
possible that they have no answers to the problems with which they have
presented the continent. Whichever it is, they would do well to reflect
that in 2017, the European publics might get fed up with the distraction
tactics of talking about clothing and instead seek answers to the
challenge we now face, as well as retribution at the polls for the
politicians who brought us here.

Douglas Murray, British author, commentator and public affairs analyst, is based in London, England.Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/9692/european-immigration Follow Middle East and Terrorism on TwitterCopyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Governor Mike Huckabee tells rabbis from Rabbinical Congress for Peace that the two state solution is a 'stupid diplomatic fantasy.'

Governor Huckabee with Rabbis

Rabbinical Congress for Peace

Former Arkansas Governor and Republican presidential candidate Mike
Huckabee met with a delegation of rabbis from the Rabbinical Congress
for Peace movement. The rabbis wished to present to him the Torah's view
regarding the holy land and the prohibition against relinquishing land
to foreigners.

The Rabbinical Congress for Peace was founded in 1993 in order to
alert public attention to the clear position of the Torah concerning
territories under Israeli rule. This halahic ruling is anchored in the
supreme value in Jewish Law known as “the sanctity of life.” Saving a
life supersedes the entire Torah. Because of this value, the Torah
unequivocally forbids relinquishing even one inch of territory under
Jewish rule or participating in any negotiations concerning withdrawal
from any such territory.

The head of the Congress, Rabbi Yosef Gerlitzky presented to Huckabee
the famous halahic ruling signed by 400 rabbis which prohibits
negotiations over parts of the land of Israel and views these
negotiations as a danger to residents of Israel. The ruling and
signatures were translated into English and Huckabee showed interest in
the Torah's view on the matter.Huckabee told the rabbis that the Torah's view is the most logical
approach to the Israeli-Arab conflict and that the "two state solution"
was a "stupid diplomatic fantasy which has no connection to reality". He
added " I don't know who invented this stupidity called 'two states for
two nations' and what he was thinking. I was surprised to find that
there are Israeli statesmen who support this notion. It will just
increase the instability in the region and the threats against the State
of Israel. I have no problem with a Palestinian state- they can set one
up in Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, one of the tens of large Arab
countries. Why divide the tiny land of Israel up? Because of terrorist
pressure or because of pressure from Obama in the few days left to him?"

The rabbis thanked Mr. Huckabee for his great support of Israel and
asked him to ensure that the Trump administration will continue the
policy of unflinching support for Israel and the uncompromising struggle
against Israel's enemies. Huckabee promised to do all he can and added
that Israel should always act according to its own interests and not try
and make concessions to curry favor with world opinion. "Just as the
Torah says, any concessions made under pressure will lead to more
pressure," he said. "The Israeli concern about "what the world will say
is a futile concern. On the contrary, everyone respects Israel and the
Jewish nation. It's important to transmit to the world that this is a
special country, a holy land promised to the Jewish nation. We should
say with pride that the basis for Jewish ownership of the land is not
politics but belief. Without belief [in G-d] the land of Israel cannot
survive but with belief- nobody can overcome it."

The meeting was
also attended by other members of the Congress, Rabbi Shalom Gold of
Har Nof, Rabbi Yaakov Shapira, head of the Merkaz Harav Yeshiva and a
member of the Chief Rabbinate Council and Rabbi Avraham Levin the
Congress secretary. Huckabee joked that he was surprised that so many
rabbis had agreed on one issue but the rabbis responded that it is a
halaha accepted in the compendium of Jewish law, the Shulhan Aruch, and
should be publicized by every rabbi. The rabbis blessed Huckabee with
success in his personal and public life and in his constant endeavors
for the sake of Israel and the Jewish people.

Yoel DombSource: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/222833 Follow Middle East and Terrorism on TwitterCopyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Symbolically, Putin, as an expert at judo, is adept at keeping foes off balance.

It would be much too unkind to say President Barack Obama is a self-made man who worships his creator. Yet it is true that he seems always to back into the limelight, a feat not likely to diminish. After leaving the office of the presidency, Obama has promised to remain busy involved in "the amazing stuff that we've been doing all these years before."

Understandably, Obama is concerned about his legacy. The calculus and equation in Obama's legacy certainly includes "amazing stuff": the faulty nuclear deal with Iran, the nonexistent red line concerning the use of chemical weapons by Syria's President Assad in 2013 and Obama's policy toward the Syrian war and the horrors of Aleppo, and Obama's refusal to admit the responsibility of Islamists for international terrorism.

Moreover, that legacy will not be enhanced by Obama's recent actions. The legacy will have to explain, if not to defend, the surprising moves by Obama in one week in December 2016 in two fields: attitude to Russia and policy toward Israel when he allowed a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlement construction to pass by not vetoing it.

It is unfortunately true that Obama leaves office at a time of the most tense relationship with Russia since the end of the Cold War. On December 29, 2016, Obama expressed the view that Russian security agencies infiltrated email servers of the Democratic National Committee and private accounts including that of John Podesta. Yet so far, even accepting that intrusion by cyberspace could have been directed only by the highest levels of a foreign government, hard evidence is still not available that the Russian government is the culprit. Nor can it be asserted that the outcome of the U.S. presidential election was decided by hacking, nor that the popular vote was tampered with in favor of Donald Trump.

An independent, non-partisan commission to investigate hacking in regard to the election is to be set up. President-Elect Trump has been skeptical of the attribution of blame to Russia. But before certainty on the issue has been obtained, Obama imposed sanctions on two Russian intelligence agencies, GRU, Russia's main intelligence directorate, and the FSB, or the Federal Security Service, the new form of the KGB. Obama has also sanctioned companies said to support GRU cyber-operations, expelled 35 officials suspected of being intelligence operatives from the US, and closed two recreational compounds.

U.S. sanctions on Russia remain. Essentially, they blocked Russian access to international credit, prevented cooperation on oil field technology, and ended arms deals. However, many of the restrictions on Russia were imposed by executive order and therefore can be reversed by President Trump.

It was not clear if the principle of reciprocity would apply. Vladimir Putin refused to retaliate, though Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov suggested that 31 U.S. diplomats be expelled from Moscow and four from St. Petersburg. Instead, Putin invited children of U.S. diplomats to enjoy New Year's and Russian Orthodox Christmas at the Kremlin.

Putin, if not exactly Santa Claus, announced he would not expel U.S. diplomats, but would rebuild ties with the U.S. Trump's comment was that this was a great move by Putin, whom he regards as very smart. The crucial fact is that Obama, whatever his motives, has left Trump the problem of ameliorating arrangements, the need to work out a compromise between the two countries, and the limiting of sanctions. Trump's task will take into account not only Democrats, but also the different views and the tension between Republicans such as John Mccain, who calls Putin a thug and a murderer, and the incoming secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, who may be an Eagle Scout but has had multiple business dealings with Putin.

Did Obama deliberately, for political or psychological reasons, limit the options for Trump? In any case, the vital need is for cooperation in fighting international terrorism in general and ISIS in particular. Obama's ostracizing of GRU and the FSB will limit that cooperation between the two countries.

This is the moment for accurate analysis and assessment of Russia and of the policies and motivation of Putin. The fall of the totalitarian Soviet Union in 1991 did not usher in a democratic political system or open society or free market. Today, Russia is more pragmatic than ideological. Private ownership created businesses, and a substantial middle class emerged. Foreign travel became more available. There was some limited free press, while the internet was available. Young women on Nevsky Prospect in St. Petersburg dress as attractively, if not as expensively, as their counterparts on Madison Avenue in New York.

But democracy was limited, and political parties reflected the Kremlin's point of view.

In the economic field, oligarchs have been prominent – entrepreneurs who accumulated capital and were friendly to and have access and links to political power and leaders. That new elite dominates the market, but the regime is ruthless, as was shown with the arrest of Mikhael Khodorkovsky and the taking over of his company, Yukos, whose assets were seized by Rosneft, the state oil company.

Changes in Russia are relevant for U.S. policy. The population, aging and decreasing, is now 144 million. Between 2005 and 2015 there has been a large increase in government. The share of GDP from public spending and state-controlled firms rose from 35 to 70%. Yet the economy is diminishing due to sanctions, corruption, and above all the drop in the price of oil, since Russia is dependent on raw materials. More than two thirds of Russian exports come from energy, and the Russian budget presumes oil at $96.

But Russia also has the world's largest inventory of nuclear weapons. It is one of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council. Symbolically, Putin, as an expert at judo, is adept at keeping foes off balance. Russia is engaged in aggression against Ukraine and Georgia, espionage, influence in the war in Syria, subversion by supporting anti-establishment parties in Europe, propaganda, and cyber-attacks. The country is sixth in global spending on defense. Annually, it spends $48.4 billion, less than one tenth of the U.S.'s $622 billion.

There is no question of Putin's desire to maintain and exercise power. Trump admires him. Putin is powerful, if not as powerful as Vladimir the Great, the tenth-century Slavic prince who was based in Kiev, whose statue is near the Kremlin and whose nationalistic legacy was relied on to justify the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Putin stopped direct regional elections, appointed his own representatives to the regions, and destroyed the principle of federalism as he concentrated power. Yet Putin is not a tyrant, though he has engaged in selective violence, murder, and rigged elections.

It appears that Putin is not taking Obama seriously and is waiting to build ties with Trump in a framework of bilateral cooperation and collaboration. Both countries naturally have their different versions of national interest, and difficult problems and misunderstandings will remain. But what is overwhelmingly important is that both Putin and Trump have similar interests in maintaining peace and international stability and ending the menace of Islamic terrorism. Already American and Russian corporations are interrelated: ExxonMobil oil and gas are in the Russian Arctic, and there are joint projects such as Sakhalin 1. The case for rapprochement between the two countries is formidable.

Michael CurtisSource: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/01/russia_a_look_at_the_bear_obama_is_poking.html Follow Middle East and Terrorism on TwitterCopyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

In just two weeks, a new US administration will
enter the White House. It may well prove to be a turning point for
Israel, reversing the tide of global hostility of the past eight years,
in which the outgoing administration regarded us diplomatically as a
rogue state rather than an ally.

President-elect Donald Trump is
regarded by many observers as volatile, unpredictable and capable of
reversing his opinions. Aside from one comment made early in his
campaign about Israel having to pay its own way, Trump and his spokesmen
– both during and after the election – have sent extraordinarily
positive signals to Israel. He personally intervened, albeit
unsuccessfully, to prevent President Barack Obama’s betrayal of Israel
at the UN Security Council. While he cannot rescind the iniquitous
Resolution 2334, he did undertake to ensure that under his
administration Israel would be treated as a genuine ally.He has conveyed other unequivocally positive messages.

His
designated ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, is a proud, outspoken
Zionist Jew, as is his point man for Middle East negotiations, Jason
Greenblatt.

Trump has made it clear he does not believe
settlements represent the cause for the breakdown in peace
negotiations, and seems determined to transfer the US embassy to
Jerusalem.

It should also be noted that Trump has more positive contacts with Jews than any former American president.

Moreover,
his daughter converted to Judaism and married Jared Kushner, an
Orthodox Jew who maintains an observant lifestyle and is one of Trump’s
key advisers.

What gives us grounds for optimism is the fact
that, whatever divisions may emerge between the Trump administration
and the Republicans who dominate both the Senate and the House of
Representatives, they are all in accord in their desire to commence a
new chapter in US-Israel relations wherein the Jewish state will be
treated as a genuine partner.

If Trump moves in this direction,
it is likely to have a major influence on the manner in which other
governments behave toward Israel and may, to some extent, mitigate the
damage of the Security Council resolution.

The remarkable
reversal of the UK, first endorsing and according to some reports,
drafting the UN resolution at the behest of the Obama administration,
and then berating US Secretary of State John Kerry’s speech, already
reflects this trend. The Australians, to their credit, condemned the
resolution from the outset.

There may even be similar movements
from a number of European governments, some of which were undoubtedly
embarrassed when the bias and double standards in their efforts at
political correctness were revealed.

The Trump administration
will undoubtedly also strengthen conservative forces which are almost
all more pro-Israel than the incumbents.

Under such
circumstances, the Palestinians are likely to discover that Egypt,
Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states – other than paying lip service to
mollify domestic pressures – are unlikely to confront a Trump
administration to defend their irrational and inflexible demands.

The real enigma is Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.

It
is ironic that the Russian foreign minister attempted to defer the
Security Council vote and then actually vetoed efforts to incorporate
Kerry’s speech as Quartet policy. He also made it clear Russia believed
negotiations for peace could only be achieved through direct
negotiations between the parties, without preconditions – a direct
repudiation of the Security Council resolution. Meanwhile, despite the
delicate nature of the issues, Netanyahu has been engaged in numerous
intimate discussions with Putin concerning Syria, border security and
Middle East affairs.

Whether Netanyahu will be enabled to
maintain this relationship will clearly depend on whether Trump
succeeds in his current objective of developing a good relationship
with Russia. If he succeeds, a joint US-Russian initiative could deter
Iran and Hezbollah from aggression against Israel. But likewise, they
could also be tempted to collude to impose a settlement that may not be
in Israel’s interests.

And so there is a very real hope that if
the Trump administration marches in this direction, 2017 will witness
dramatic, almost revolutionary changes as new political leaders emerge
who are no longer willing to appease Islamic extremists and have tired
of political correctness and the chaos largely inflicted because of
Obama’s distorted world vision. Many may gravitate toward Trump in the
hope that he will initiate a new world order. This could have
significant positive repercussions for Israel.

That is why it is
important for Israel to demonstrate unity and restraint. The tone of
our relationship with the new administration will be determined over the
next few months and thus it is imperative to obtain consensus on the
critical issues confronting us over the next few years, because we now
have a unique opportunity of persuading the new administration and the
pro-Israeli Congress to institutionalize our core requirements. If we
do not achieve this, we could be facing a Democratic regime in four
years’ time, headed by anti-Israeli elements such as Bernie Sanders and
Keith Ellison.

At such a crucial time, cabinet responsibility
should be implemented as in any democratic country. Ministers behaving
like shadow prime ministers and making imperious policy statements on
settlements and annexation to curry votes should shut up or go into
opposition.

The time to debate the merits of annexations and
building settlements outside the major settlement blocs is only after
the critical issues have been resolved.

Yesh Atid’s Yair Lapid has emerged as a credible centrist leader and shares similar views to the prime minister.

Ideally, he should join Netanyahu and act as his foreign minister. However, that is unlikely to happen.

But
he should at least offer Netanyahu a safety net if extreme-right
elements seek to undermine his efforts by reverting to demands for
Greater Israel.

Netanyahu must consult Trump privately and seek to obtain his support on the following core issues:

•
A reaffirmed commitment to President George W. Bush’s April 2004
letter in which he agreed that the 1949 armistice lines could not serve
as the new borders and that the US would recognize the demographic
changes justifying Israeli retention of the settlement blocs. Bush made
this commitment in recognition of Sharon’s Gaza disengagement. It was
unilaterally rescinded by Obama.

• Formal US endorsement to annex
the major settlement blocs, which, prior to Resolution 2334, all
parties acknowledged would always remain part of Israel in a final
settlement.

• Recognition of the annexation of the Golan Heights.

•
Assurance that the US will exert pressure on Iran. If Trump achieves
détente with the Russians, Netanyahu’s excellent relationship with
Putin could also be leveraged to deter Iran and Hezbollah from stoking
the fire against Israel.

• Promotion of America’s global position in an effort to neutralize the double standards and bias against Israel at the UN.

Finally,
he should emphasize that while the majority of Israelis remain adamant
that they do not want to annex another three million Arabs and wish to
separate from the Palestinians, a two-state policy, as originally
conceived, is now not even on the horizon. The UNSC resolution that
Obama facilitated has empowered the radical Palestinian leaders,
reinforcing their delusion that Israel is doomed to destruction in
stages and that the Jews’ fate will follow that of the Crusaders.

Netanyahu
would be well advised to consult with his experts. In lieu of
repeating the empty mantra of supporting a two-state policy or the
status quo, he needs to develop an alternative policy for separation
which may involve ceding control over areas to the Jordanians and
Egyptians.

Trump’s attitude toward Israel still remains an issue
of considerable conjecture. Besides, initially he will be
concentrating on domestic affairs. However, if Netanyahu succeeds in
establishing a productive relationship with him, 2017 may be a positive
turning point for Israel and our prime minister will emerge as one of
Israel’s greatest leaders.Isi Leibler’s website can be viewed at www.wordfrom Jerusalem.com He may be contacted at ileibler@leibler.comSource: http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Candidly-Speaking-Israel-and-the-Trump-administration-477464 Follow Middle East and Terrorism on TwitterCopyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.